rhines (u/rhines) - Readit News

rhines commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

Tom1380 · 5 days ago

What is meant by writing comments for the algorithm?

rhines · 18 hours ago

Or upvotes might be a better example, at least for Reddit/Hackernews. But the idea being that the comments are sorted based on some algorithm, whether than be popularity or something else, and commenters are trying to optimize for that. In traditional forums where comments are sorted linearly and it's more about having a discussion with others, but when comments are surfaced by other metrics then it's less about the discussion and more about gaming those metrics.

rhines commented on DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says finance.yahoo.com/news/ch... · Posted by u/goodway

rllearneratwork · 5 days ago

pretty sure it is against ToS for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

rhines · 5 days ago

ToS didn't stop the companies that built those models and it won't stop the companies that bootstrap off them. Until an AI company eats a multi billion dollar lawsuit for unlawful data use they will continue to operate this way.

rhines commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

baby · 6 days ago

That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen suicides and all.

rhines · 6 days ago

Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At least for most people anyway. The average user, and probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through.

If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.

It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.

rhines commented on Algorithms for Optimization [pdf] algorithmsbook.com/optimi... · Posted by u/Anon84

rhines · 15 days ago

Thanks for sharing this, looks like a useful overview of the field. I wish the first edition had come out a year or two earlier - this would have been a great resource for my undergrad research work. Back then there were no books covering CMA-ES, surrogate models, and gaussian processes all in one book, everything was scattered across different books and papers, with varying levels of technical depth and differing notations.

rhines commented on There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests arstechnica.com/health/20... · Posted by u/voxadam

Mistletoe · 20 days ago

There doesn’t need to be an off-ramp they just have to take it for life. Why would someone think they would keep the weight off? If they could they would have before Ozempic.

rhines · 20 days ago

I could see it building habits that persist even when no longer using the drugs. They've found other things to fill their time instead of eating, and things which would previously trigger them to start eating now trigger them to do other things.

There's of course a risk that when they stop the drugs that hunger will drive them to re-establish those habits, but now that they have new habits that fight that hunger they are in a much better position to resist it than they were when they'd initially established their eating patterns.

rhines commented on Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit djnn.sh/posts/anthropic-s... · Posted by u/vxvxvx

tim333 · a month ago

I was just watching the Y Combinator interview with Alexandr Wang who I guess may be being referred to https://youtu.be/5noIKN8t69U

The teenage data labeler thing was a bit of an exaggeration. He did found scale.ai at nineteen which does data labeling amongst other things.

rhines · a month ago

I watched this interview when I first heard about Alexandr Wang. I'd seen he was the youngest self made billionaire, which is a pretty impressive credential to have under your belt, and I wanted to see if I could get a read on what sets him apart.

Unfortunately he doesn't reveal any particular intelligence, insight, or drive in the interview, nor does he in other videos I found. Possibly he hides it, or possibly his genius is beyond me. Or possibly he had good timing on starting a data labelling company and then leveraged his connections in SV (including being roommates with Sam Altman) to massively inflate Scale AI's valuation and snag a Meta acquisition.

rhines commented on A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator larslofgren.com/codesmith... · Posted by u/SilverElfin

nebula8804 · 2 months ago

This is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)

"Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.

rhines · 2 months ago

I'm not sure I agree. If I go to a photography forum, there will be one thread for photos taken with a specific camera. Those threads are easily found and I can browse them to get huge amounts of relevant info if I'm interested in that camera. If I want to find that on Reddit or Discord, god help me. At best I can hope for a specific subreddit or server dedicated to that. But mostly I'll find hundreds of posts or comments mentioning or asking about that camera, all by people I don't know and have no way of judging if they know their stuff.

Discord and Reddit have so much repetition and fragmentation because there's no real organization of content, and people with no expertise often weigh in and even get upvoted because the average user is not particularly knowledgeable and the experts aren't on 24/7 looking for new posts to contribute to. On forums topics are stickier and get bumped when there's activity so experts more often find relevant threads and it's easier to judge reputations on forums.

Granted, badly managed forums are bad. If question threads from new users are mixed in with everything else they can quickly dominate search results. You need to be able to filter, but IME most forums do have pretty decent filters.

rhines commented on A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator larslofgren.com/codesmith... · Posted by u/SilverElfin

nikitaga · 2 months ago

The authenticity of old fashioned forums is often outweighed by their poor UX and in general terrible ergonomics. It's no wonder that so few people want to use them anymore. Reddit's "nested, collapsible comments sorted by upvotes" format is simply superior.

20 years after Reddit started, the best that the forums can offer is perhaps discourse.org, which is barely any better than traditional forums – sleeker UI for sure, but it's still fundamentally the same unworkable linear format. It's like sticking to magnetic tapes in the age of SSDs.

Even Facebook, one of the dumbest discussion platforms, has nested comments. Terribly implemented of course, but how does the platform designed for the lowest-common-denominator kind of user have more advanced discussion features than forums made for discussion connoisseurs? It is utterly baffling.

rhines · 2 months ago

I strongly disagree. But maybe because of a difference of perspective. If you're imagining a Reddit-scale forum, with millions of people with no sense of community and no knowledge of the content they're consuming, then yeah a traditional forum format is awful.

Forums shine as spaces for focused communities, where people have reputations and care about the subject matter. Time-sorted discussions are great because that's what's happening - a discussion in the community. You don't want to read someone's quip first, you want to get the whole context. You don't want there to be upvotes that people try to earn - there's already your reputation in the community. If someone's a troll or gives bad advice or is wrong, they'll get called out, or banned, or simply ignored as everyone knows they aren't respected.

Forums just aren't meant for generic content and it's not because of the UI, it's because the entire concept is not compatible with masses of semi-anonymous users with no commonalities.

rhines commented on "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore iamcharliegraham.substack... · Posted by u/grahac

bodhi_mind · 2 months ago

Saying everything is a CRUD app is a reflection on the level of abstraction a developer usually works in.

Someone who worked more in embedded systems may say something like “everything is ‘just’ a state machine.”

rhines · 2 months ago

It's also IMO valid. CRUD isn't derogatory. It's also not particularly illuminating though. Almost everything is a CRUD app. If you get the fundamental data structures, access patterns, and control flow right for those CRUD operations, you have the foundations for what can be a successful app. And then you enhance it further - games add nice graphics, collaborative workspaces add good conflict resolution, social media sites add addictive recommendation systems. The core is CRUD but that doesn't mean the work stops there.

rhines commented on Altoids by the Fistful scottsmitelli.com/article... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

falseprofit · 3 months ago

Can you explain the correct interpretation? Asking for a friend.

rhines · 3 months ago

I could be mistaken, but my read is that years of dealing with cat turds day in day out has numbed the author to their stench. His once prized chocolates now have become themselves cat turds, and he lacks the senses to even realize it. Note how dusty the container was - the author didn't care to maintain his chocolates, and now here he is. The forgotten side projects, the tech we wanted to learn... things we lost the motivation for or now execute with the same cat turd quality as we've grown accustomed to.